Queens Ponders Post-Modern Life

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: May 16, 2003

It breezed into the neighborhood like a Hollywood film crew. Its big-name stars drew crowds of the curious, creating lucrative opportunities for the resourceful.

But after Monday, the stars — the dueling modernists Matisse and Picasso — will be packed away, and by September 2004 the Museum of Modern Art will return to its newly expanded home in Manhattan.

Everyone in Long Island City, of course, knows that the Modern's charmed visit to Queens will end. But they still wonder whether the museum will leave anything enduring behind. Will it help reshape a raw Queens neighborhood, known for its factories and warehouses and the gridlock around the Queensboro Bridge, into the next SoHo or TriBeCa?

Cultural institutions have long been seen as a shrewd way to invigorate neighborhoods. Lincoln Center transformed the decaying West Side of Manhattan. Newark is betting on its performing arts center to bring foot traffic back to a devastated downtown.

Long Island City, whose seven other scattered museums have allowed it to style itself as a museum district just a 15-minute subway ride from Times Square, hoped for a similar jolt of electricity from the Modern. But museum officials made clear from the beginning that the world-class collection was just passing through. Its royal blue building in Queens, in a revamped Swingline stapler factory on Queens Boulevard and 33rd Street, was intended for storage and study. Its use as an exhibition hall began last summer and is supposed to last for only two and a half years, until the museum's headquarters on West 53rd Street are refurbished.

For the moment, the Modern has indisputably enriched the surrounding industrial streets, particularly since the "Matisse Picasso" exhibition opened on Feb. 13 and doubled attendance to more than 4,000 people a day. The hot-dog vendors and fruit peddlers arrayed alongside the lines of visitors as well as the restaurants a few blocks east in Sunnyside are making far more money. Manna from heaven, they might call it.

Hemsin, a once quiet Turkish restaurant on Queens Boulevard, now has lines of diners waiting for its shish kebab and baba ganoush. Hilmi Yurdusever, 34, one of the restaurant's partners, had to hire three waiters and is hoping to use his bonanza to open another restaurant in Manhattan.

"The quality of people has come up," he said last week of his clientele. "Before I had ordinary people. Now I'm meeting vice presidents, presidents and executive officers."

Down the block, Dazies, an Italian restaurant and a 30-year Sunnyside institution, has tripled business and created the MoMA Cocktail, a bluish drink made with Bacardi orange rum, Grand Marnier, blue Curaçao and a drop of orange juice.

Most of the museums in western Queens, like the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center — a Modern affiliate since 1999 — the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum and the Sculpture Center and the Museum for African Art, report sharp surges in attendance as a result of culture vultures unsated by the riches of "Matisse Picasso." The African art museum joined with Noguchi in draping a banner across the street from the Modern and the African museum offers free admission and cups of coffee to the exhibit's ticketholders. Carlyn Mueller, public relations director for the African art museum, said 200 extra visitors a day have been counted.

"It was important that we get the right traffic," she said, "have new visitors spread the word about the Museum for African Art and its relationship to Matisse's and Picasso's work." (One example: Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" features tribal masks as faces on some of its five angular nudes.)

There are also more than a few cases of clever entrepreneurship in the neighborhood. Michele Bonelli, a veteran painter, was urged by a real estate agent to hang 17 colorful motion studies in the oblong lobby of a cosmetics factory next door to the Modern. The gesture has produced at least two sales.

But there are skeptics. Mike Matthews, president of the company that produces the Electro-Harmonix sound modifiers used by many rock bands, said of the neighborhood, "Once this special exhibit is over, it will become dead again, though I hope not." Mr. Matthews, a genial cigar chomper, lives in an apartment, complete with whirlpool, that he set up in his factory. As something of a nighthawk, he knows how desolate the streets become once the workers leave.

In fact, most businesses in Long Island City are manufacturers or commercial enterprises like Citigroup and MetLife that have not directly benefited from the museum. Don Valentine, the manager of Branded Leather, which makes black motorcycle jackets for a rarefied coterie of customers that include Hell's Angels and F.B.I. agents, said visitors to the museum stop by his ground-floor retail shop, but few buy. "The museum crowd," Mr. Valentine said, "is not very into motorcycles."

Despite such demurrals, Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University, said he thought that the museum's brief tenure had made many more people aware of Long Island City. Now the neighborhood must find ways of keeping the momentum alive, perhaps with another blockbuster. "Once you've proven you can get people to come there, now you've got to get people to stay there," he said.